Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to a joint meeting of Congress at the U.S. Capitol, Washington, U.S., July 24, 2024. (AFP Photo)
The unlimited support western powers give to Israel is a continuation of colonial violence and white supremacy. The U.S. and the west wield a false moral superiority over colonized peoples struggling for liberation.
“The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their ‘vital interests’ are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the ‘sanctity’ of human life, or the ‘conscience’ of the civilized world”
(James Baldwin)
As bombs supplied to the Israeli settler state by the settler colonial state known as the United States, are once again raining down on the battered and dehumanized people of Gaza, it would still seem that in a rational world, a world in which there was an elementary baseline of morality, a live-streamed crime of a magnitude not seen since the end of the second world-war would be incomprehensible.
However, that world does not exist. Instead, we live in a world still defined and controlled by the hypocritical powers of the West. A West infused with values and ideas demonstrating it has never had any concerns for humanity beyond itself. And even within its own cultures, it has degraded and dehumanized the weak and vulnerable as part of a natural relationship and manifest destiny providence supported by God.
That understanding of the inherent barbarity of the West must serve as the guideposts for how those of us on the receiving end of this Western “civilization” exist in the world. We clearly understand the meaning of the words of the Martique poet and revolutionary Aime Cesaire who clarified why Hitler became the symbol of absolute evil for Europeans, not because of the evilness of his crimes but because he committed those crimes against the white man: “it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.” (Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism)
We cannot have any illusions about the nature of the West and the pathological commitment to continued white supremacy. That commitment, unstated but in times of crisis increasingly stated in the West, has always been the fuel for the fascism at the heart of its civilizational project.
The denial of the humanity of non-European people has always been the ideological and philosophical justification for enslavement, the savage conquest of the Americas, colonial consolidation of white power in the 19th century and “American exceptionalism. And it is the justification for the murder of “Amelek” that Netanyahu called for in Gaza, quoting from the very same verse found in the bible and quoted by the white settlers in the U.S. as they fulfilled their “manifest destiny” by scalping, raping, burning and killings millions from sea to shining sea. Make America Great gain and U.S. exceptionalism are two sides of the same racist, white supremacist coin.
It is this colonial project, the desire to emulate the white West, to be a part of the white West that inspired the early Zionist strategists. Zionism became the right-wing answer to the “national question,” a question that Lenin and other Marxists and anti-colonial fighters grappled with to fashion a principled revolutionary position on the reality of the colonial division of the world.
For those early Zionists, throwing their lot in with European colonialism was essential to the success of their colonial enterprise, even when it was obvious that those same Europeans had no hesitation in murdering as many Jewish people as possible. With a nation that they could then use to more firmly align with the white West, the road to economic prosperity and eventual “whiteness” became their “eyes on the prize.”
The success of this strategy is obvious. Not only can they count on the white West to support all of their criminal behavior but to protect them against any repercussions of their criminality. That is the spirit of Trump’s executive order leveling sanctions against the International Criminal Court as a consequence of its indictment of Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, as well as the condemnation of the court and attempts to intimidate the International Court of Justice by the U.S. and various European powers into not rendering the obvious judgement that Israel is involved in an active genocide in Gaza.
And now with the greenlight given to the Israeli fascists by the bipartisan fascists running the U.S. and relative silence of the Europeans, the resumption of the vicious carnage in Gaza has commenced with devastating consequences for the terrorized people of Gaza, as just yesterday over 400 Gazans were murdered, over 500 maimed, and the entire population terrorized and pushed to the nadir of demoralization and despondency. This is evidenced by reports of a young baby telling her Palestinian mother that she just wants to die as a result of Israeli state terrorism exercised with qualified impunity.
For that Palestinian child and all the children of Palestine there will be no “humanitarian intervention” and no “responsibility to protect” from the white West because Palestinian lives mean nothing. Those phony human rights concepts have been laid to rest as the instrumentalized concepts for Western imperialism that they were. The Western world sends a quotidian message to the people of Palestine, “Shut up and die.”
Something else has been laid to rest, and it is a good thing - the ahistorical and completely fictional belief that the collective West ever had any moral or ethical positions that had any value for any people or nation in the world. The “West” has always been a fiction. A construct imposed on the world through blood, steel, and duplicity.
As the blood of women and children in Gaza flow through the dirt roads and scattered ruins of what use to be their homes, and the young people who dare to oppose this barbarity are prosecuted while the powerful pretend that Ukraine is the issue worthy of their consideration, let us, the “woke,” the rational, the principled, commit ourselves to building a world in which this kind of criminality can never happen again.
And how do we do that? By defeating the idea and material reality of the West. Trump is not an aberration of the West and neither was Hitler. They are products and foregone conclusions of the West. They are nothing more than individuals engendered by a larger system of white supremacy that renders the world into the blood-soaked uncivilized place that it is today.
There is no confusion on this when the history of the West is demystified as part of the decolonization process. In the “Clash of Civilizations,” Samuel Huntington understood what the decolonized always understood, “that the West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values, but by its superiority in applying organized violence.”
All rational people want peace. The people of Palestine would like to live in peace. However, it is clear, as it is for the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP), that real peace can only be realized when the people defeat global systems of oppression that are primarily emanating from the West including, but not limited to, colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy as the primary contradictions facing humanity.
Until those objectives are realized, no nation and no people are safe. It is Palestine today and who knows for tomorrow.
For the righteous elements that live in the West and are prepared to surrender their unearned privileges and join in a common humanity with the rest of the world, we can ensure that “never again” means just that, never again for any part of the human family.
In the meantime, Palestine bleeds and our common humanity is assaulted by the perverted monsters of the West.
Ajamu Baraka is the Director of the North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights and an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S.-based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) and the Steering Committee of the Black is Back Coalition.
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